I Challenge ID to Dance

Today we went to church with our grandparents and 2 cousins. I’ve been to a lot of different churches and the first time can always be a little awkward. But while we were there, the pastor was talking about “insider language”. It’s the idea that with a tight community you tend to have words or phrases that mean something important to you, but outside of that community it doesn’t mean a hole lot. This made me think of how MVPS has a lot of “insider language”: “fail up,” “HMW statements,” “be a transformer,” “DEEP design thinking,” “start with questions,” etc.

These phrases do mean a lot to us at MVPS, but “how might we” make them mean something to the outside community?

After the CDC yesterday, the Disney Cohort had those 3 questions we were trying to focus on: HMW assist the CDC with these three problems? HMW enhance creative confidence among others? HMW share our story with others? This last question is the one I would like to focus on now.

During brainstorming Margret White had said, maybe as a joke, “Let’s make an interpretive dance.” If you have read several of my post, you may recall that I went to a church camp in Pennsylvania where I learned miming dances to christian songs. Now when I go to church or do other things specifically more related to faith, I always think of miming because acting and dancing (gymnastics/acro included) is one of the best ways for me to really express myself. After church, miming is what made me think of the interpret dance idea again.

I thought it over some, and now I’ve decided to challenge Margret and the rest of the Disney Cohort: Let’s do it! Let’s make an interpretive dance to show what we do to everyone else!

Why not? We have musicians, dancers, engineers, artist, and people good with digital media as far as I know. Why can’t we make or learn how to play a song, choreograph a dance, design and build a set and props and costumes, and use digital media to create special effects to showcase what we do? This could be our “School of Rock” moment.

Being the Disney Cohort, I got inspired by Disney Friends for Changeafter thinking about all of this. I knew they had made some inspirational songs to encourage kids to go out and make a difference in the world, and that’s what MVPS’ goal is too. The big step is figuring out what story do we want to tell. Our questions was “HMW share our story with others?”, but some other questions to consider are “What story do we want to tell?” and “HMW make people interested to hear our story?”

This thought lead me back to how we helped at the CDC to teach them how to enhance their team, and also to show them how design thinking can help with problem solving. Everyone seemed to really enjoy that, so I would like to advocate for us starting the “ID Counseling Team” (or whatever we decide to call it). Basically, this implies us going to other companies and mentoring them like we did with the CDC. We helped them, and we also got inspired ourselves which is what was truly amazing about the experience. What if this becomes the story we tell? The story of how we go on Ventures to mutually gain \ experience, knowledge, and inspiration with other companies through design thinking.

So, for the Disney Cohort, and anyone else, I challenge us to make an interpretive dance to tell our story!